The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, remains under armed guard in hospital, too wounded to be interrogated.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, is searched by law enforcement officers in this handout photo provided by the Massachusetts State Police in Watertown, Mass., on Friday. Tsarnaev had been hiding in the stern of a boat parked in the backyard of a house in Watertown, police said. A resident called police after spotting blood on the boat.

The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing remains under armed guard in hospital, too wounded to be interrogated.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, was listed in serious but stable condition — and reportedly unable to talk — after being captured Friday night bleeding from bullet wounds. He was lying in a boat parked in the backyard of a home near Boston. He has not yet been charged. His older brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, was killed earlier Friday after a firefight with police.

With the motive for the bombing still unknown, the FBI noted it had Tamerlan, 26, on its radar more than two years before the attack that killed three people and wounded more than 170 at the race finish line Monday.

In a press release, the FBI said a foreign government notified the agency in early 2011 about information that “he was a follower of radical Islam” and that “he had changed drastically since 2010 as he prepared to leave the United States for travel to the country’s region to join unspecified underground groups.”

A U.S. law enforcement source told Reuters on Saturday that Russia was the foreign government that tipped off the FBI.

The mother of the bombing suspects insisted the FBI had Tamerlan under surveillance for at least three years.

“They knew what my son was doing, they knew what sites on the Internet he was going to,” Zubeidat Tsarnaeva told the English-language television station Russia Today in a phone interview Saturday.

“They were telling me that he is really a serious leader and they’re afraid of him. How could this happen? They were controlling every step of him,” she added, using the direct English translation of a Russian word that means monitored. Tsarnaeva, who was speaking from Makhachkala, a city in Russia’s Dagestan region, also insisted her sons were innocent. “I am, like, 100 per cent sure that this is a setup,” she said.

The FBI said it responded to the 2011 request by interviewing Tamerlan and his family. The agency also looked for “derogatory telephone communications, possible use of online sites associated with the promotion of radical activity, associations with other persons of interest, travel history and plans, and education history.”

“The FBI did not find any terrorism activity, domestic or foreign, and those results were provided to the foreign government in the summer of 2011,” the agency added. “The FBI requested but did not receive more specific or additional information from the foreign government.”

Before Monday’s bombing, the Tsarnaev brothers had been living in the United States for about a decade. The Tsarnaev family fled Chechnya in the early 1990s and came to the U.S. from Kyrgyzstan after living briefly in Russia’s Dagestan region.

Tamerlan, an amateur boxer who was married to Katherine Russell and had a young daughter, was in the country legally. He had been the subject of a photo essay by photographer Johannes Hirn, who wrote that Tamerlan had studied at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston hoping to become an engineer, but took the semester off to train for an upcoming boxing competition.

Dzhokhar, a popular teenager who won a city scholarship for college and was considered to be a talented wrestler, was a U.S. citizen. The brothers’ father, Anzor Tsarnaev, said Dzhokhar was in the pre-med program at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Students at the Pine Dale dormitory at the university said Dzhokhar lived on the third floor there, and expressed shock that he was a suspect in the bombings.

Tamerlan travelled to Russia last year to visit relatives, his Toronto aunt, Maret Tsarnaeva, said in an interview. He reportedly returned in July, after a six-month stay. Tsarnaeva, who said she has received several death threats by anonymous callers since Friday, said the parents of the bombing suspects are planning to travel to the U.S. to be with their surviving son.

She said she spoke with Anzor Tsarnaev by phone Saturday.

“He’s devastated,” she said of her brother. “I spoke to him this morning and he broke down in tears. He was just shaking and not able to speak.”

“Our boys were framed from the very beginning,” she insisted. “It is the ugliest time, the saddest time in our lives.”

On Saturday, U.S. President Barack Obama promised that investigators would eventually uncover what motivated the suspects.

“The families of those killed so senselessly deserve answers,” Obama said, adding that one of the many unanswered questions is whether others helped the men.

“When a tragedy like this happens, with public safety at risk and the stakes so high, it’s important that we do this right,” he said. “That’s why we take care not to rush to judgment — not about the motivations of these individuals, certainly not about entire groups of people.”

The family of 8-year-old Martin Richard, who died in the bombing, congratulated police officers for killing or capturing the brothers suspected of launching a five-day-long nightmare that during Friday’s manhunt had the whole region in lockdown.

“Tonight, our family applauds the entire law enforcement community for a job well done, and trust that our justice system will now do its job,” the Richards family said in a statement.

A special team of interrogators is poised to question the surviving suspect. But when they will be able to do that is unclear. Reuters reports he was shot in the throat and could not speak because of injuries to his tongue.

“It’s serious . . . he’s not yet able to speak,” Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick told reporters Saturday. “We have a million questions and those questions need to be answered.”

When the interrogation team does question Dzhokhar, they reportedly plan to do so without first informing him of his right to a lawyer and his right to remain silent. On its website, the FBI explains the unusual procedure can be used when a danger to police officers or the public needs to first be neutralized. Civil libertarians have attacked the plan as “immoral, unconstitutional and wrong.”

Security experts note it’s only a matter of time before questions are also asked about the FBI’s investigation of Tamerlan in 2011.

“There will likely be an inquiry into how is it that they did not catch onto him,” said Christian Leuprecht, a professor at both the Royal Military College of Canada and Queen’s University. “Is there anything in the way that the law is written that prevented intelligence agencies from doing the job they need to do?”

Leuprecht notes that in Canada and the U.S., voicing extreme ideas isn’t enough to land you in jail. What’s needed, he adds, is evidence of being prepared to use violence to uphold those ideas or of encouraging others to use violence.

“It points to the difficulty we’ve put intelligence services in,” he said. “On the one hand we expect them to pick out all the radicals and rein them in and make sure they don’t do anything crazy. On the other, we live in a society where we agree that just having marginal ideas is not illegal.”

Wesley Wark, a national security expert at the University of Ottawa, notes the FBI is divided into an intelligence gathering branch and a law enforcement arm.

“When you have an agency that’s both a law enforcement and an intelligence gathering agency, it’s sometimes difficult to decide what to do with information like this,” Wark said, referring to the foreign government tip about Tamerlan. “The information might be of interest from an intelligence point of view . . . but it might not reach the bar that suggests any kind of crime would be committed.”

Wark expects U.S. officials to eventually closely review the FBI’s actions but insists it’s too early to suggest the agency dropped the ball. It’s not known if the information about Tamerlan from the foreign government was reliable, and the places he visited — Dagestan and Chechnya — do not have terrorist training camps, Wark added.

Leuprecht said it would be a “significant game changer” if evidence eventually concludes that Tamerlan left his U.S. home, got terrorist training abroad and returned to unleash a strike on U.S. soil. That’s a radicalization model that has yet to be seen in North America, he said. Past homegrown extremists have gone off to train and unleash violence abroad. In July 2012, for example, a 23-year-old amateur boxer from Toronto, William Plotnikov, was killed by Russian security forces while fighting with Islamist rebels in Dagestan.

With files from Star wire services

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